the appearance of a nightmare snatched out of the unconscious and projected on the tiny screen.
Suddenly, the camera shifted. On the ground, rows of bodies were being lined up by rescue workers. The camera moved in, greedy for spectacle. Patrick saw blood-stained faces, children’s faces, shattered bodies, severed limbs. The camera moved along the rows, its hunger growing. The music swelled. He saw small teeth pressed against bloodless lips, eyes fixed in death, hair matted with blood and plaster. He closed his eyes, and still bloody images marched across his vision, the screaming child, the knife, the flesh tearing, his hands plunging into the open chest, the steaming heart. He opened his eyes and saw the television faces again, saw the room rock, heard the music grow and fade, grow and fade, the walls bulge and close in. As he fell, he heard the voice of the oboe change to a last, despairing scream against the darkness.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Between Burano and the mainland lie the mud-flats and shattered islets of the northern lagoon. It is a region of the desolate heart, wreathed for much of the year in mists and shadows, dull, remote, full of reeds and marine sadnesses. Its narrow channels are marked by tall bricole, long wooden stakes that pattern out the shallows from the navigable deeps. They stand high in the tired sunlight like stumps of an ancient forest from whose branches the birds have long since fled.
They had taken the water-bus from the Fonda-menta Nuove to Burano. They carried small bags, with a little food and two flashlights with spare batteries. The boat had travelled slowly, as though bereft of purpose, cold, unsteady, and almost empty. Four other passengers kept them company: two as far as Murano, the remainder to Mazzorbo. They had gone the rest of the way alone, save for the pilot and his assistant, reaching Burano by mid- morning.
Once there, it had proved surprisingly difficult to find a boatman who would either admit to knowing the whereabouts of San Vitale in Palude, or show himself willing to take them to its shores. It was as though a curse had fallen on the place. Patrick detected a mute uneasiness in all with whom he spoke. Once, bending to tie a shoelace, he had noticed an old fisherman to whom they had previously spoken watching with an intent and troubled expression. After a little while, the shaking of heads and the sullen silences combined to produce in them a state of despair akin to hopelessness.
They found their man just after lunch in a small bar not far from the little harbour.
‘They tell me you’re looking for someone to take you to San Vitale.’
He was old and rather down-at-heel, with a hard leather face that might have been stretched and moulded over a frame in Claudio Surian’s workshop. White bristles peppered a weak chin that had once been badly injured and reassembled by a clumsy surgeon. Unfocussed eyes suggested longer hours at the bar than at the rudder. He smiled toothlessly and without the least trace of warmth.
Patrick nodded.
‘How much?’ the old boatman asked.
‘I’ll give you one hundred thousand. There and back.’
‘Vaffanculo! What you think I am, mister? A fucking gondolier? Listen - you want a nice little trip up some nice little canals, you want some cunt to sing some pansy arias, get the fuck back to Venice. Two hundred.’
Patrick shrugged. He was in no mood to argue. They had lost enough time already.
They left Burano in silence, creeping away like thieves whose movements are being watched. Having negotiated his price, the old man had clammed up. He evinced no curiosity about his passengers or their journey, expressed neither surprise nor disapproval. The last thing Patrick saw as their sandolo moved away from the harbour was a little knot of fishermen on the quayside, watching them turn into the channel that led to Torcello.
The only sound was the creaking of the oar turning in the rowlock. Patrick was reminded of his dreams. This, he thought with a stab of fear, was the dream’s continuation, its working out in the waking world.
But now that he felt himself so close, he feared a denouement, dreaded whatever revelation the next hours would bring. In the swirling water, he fancied he saw figures move across a television screen.
He had said nothing to Assefa about his dream of the night before. Waking at dawn, he had been covered in sweat and shivering, but he had not cried out. Images from the dream clung to his mind like flies to an old web; he could feel the feet of spiders moving close, but however hard he tried, he could not shake the images free. Above all, the sound of the child’s screams echoed across the empty landscape through which they passed. He dipped his hand into the water, as if to wash it clean of blood.
A low mist lay on the water like a mask. They were a small black shadow, a beetle or crab, crawling slowly across the flat white surface, pushing the mist aside only to see it form again behind their stern. It was cold out on the lagoon. Patrick and Assefa shivered, regretting they had not come better dressed. The old boatman seemed impervious to the damp chill of the place, as though his leathery carapace had been genetically created for the rigours of life on such desolate waters.
Once, Patrick thought he saw another boat move out from the shelter of an islet to their west, but when he drew it to Assefa’s attention, it had already gone. Here, beyond Torcello, the channels grew more treacherous and the bricole fewer and less certain. In places, fishermen had set thin willow-wands and rods of bramble to mark off their fish-traps.
They ran aground twice on hidden mud-flats, and all three men were forced out, knee-deep in mud, to push the sturdy little craft back into deeper waters. Here and there, a dismal islet showed the remains of an abandoned wall or gateway, tokens of vanished
glories: old monasteries long ago dissolved, forts useless now against a tide of tourists and international business executives, the wattle huts of fishermen, empty for the winter. Once, they passed a tall wooden tripod on whose top a shrine to the Madonna stood custodian over a particularly fretful channel. Faded flowers clung to her feet, and by her hand an extinguished candle marked the devotion of some passing boatman.
The old man raised one hand and nodded past the shrine.
‘La paluda maggiore. The great marsh. Not far now. Half an hour.’ They were the first words he had spoken since their departure.
Patrick felt uneasy to be so much at the old man’s mercy. Out here, in the lost reaches of the lagoon, where no sound carried and not even a sea-bird’s wing broke the expanse of mud and water, they could be left stranded without difficulty.
They drifted to a halt. The boatman shipped his oar and turned to face the side.
Why are we stopping?’ Patrick asked. Was the old man going to demand more money, now he had them in the middle of nowhere?
But he merely unbuttoned his trousers and proceeded to urinate over the side of the boat. Finished, he rowed on, but his brief action had further impressed on Patrick the man’s intimacy with this place: This is my lagoon, these are my waters, I piss in them as I would at home, they don’t mind.
Just over half-an-hour later, the hazy outlines of a low island appeared above the mist. As they drew nearer, it acquired shape and texture. Dark cypresses ringed the fractured lineaments of a squat, twelfth-century church. Closer still, the building developed depth and detail: the style was Ravenna Byzantine,
the materials chiefly brick and marble, both much distressed by inclement weather and long neglect. Beside the church, a free-standing campanile had lost its upper storey; it jutted up from the cypresses like an admonitory finger placed there to warn the curious away from the island’s deserted shores.
The old man beached the sandolo in a small cove just west of the church. Whatever landing-stage had once served the island had long ago collapsed or been covered by the tangled bushes that in most places crept unhampered to the water’s edge. They disembarked in two feet of water and helped the boatman pull the sandolo higher up, above the tide-mark. The beach was stony and green with water-weeds.
‘How long you going to be?’ The old man spat and took a mouldy pipe from his inside pocket.
‘Not long,’ Patrick replied. ‘We just want to look at the church. Let’s say a couple of hours at the most.’
The boatman shrugged and started filling his pipe with foul-smelling tobacco.
‘Suit yourselves. But I can’t stay here all day. I want to get back to Burano well before dark. A man can get lost in these waters. There aren’t no lights out this far.’ He found a small knoll further inland and sat on it, lighting his pipe and puffing out smoke like a chimney with indigestion.
‘If you aren’t back in two hours, I’m leaving. And if I leave, you’re stranded. Nobody comes here, understand? Nobody. If I’ve got to come back for you tomorrow, it’ll cost you double. No skin off my nose.’ He spat a gob of brown saliva on the ground and stuck his pipe back in his mouth.
